With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in recent years, service providers have turned to application servers as a platform of choice for providing services to users. Service providers may install applications on one or more servers over an application server product. The application server product provides centralized management and supporting services to the applications. Many of such services include a messaging component that may include messages for display to a user, for example.
One problem that arises with messaging in application server controlled environments is that the message routines need to be coordinated between a variety of disparate machines in a distributed system. Differences in release levels among machines in the distributed environment can result in chaos if the messaging components are not properly deployed to account for these differences. One approach to addressing this problem is to employ a subsystem having a configuration that includes a set of parameters that indicate to servers and clients where and how to store and retrieve messages.
However, such conventional configuration mechanisms cannot address the needs of individual applications for customization, reducing flexibility and achievable functionality of applications built upon such conventional approaches.